When a gangster becomes a landlord

My friend's landlord already had two months of deposit (~ 5000 USD), but he was kicking my friend out of the house early and he wanted another 1500 USD to cover potential damages. The answer was no, so the landlord came and crashed our office. He smoked. He yelled. He threatened. 


We called the police.

Hour 1. Police station.


The landlord took a long puff at his cigar ("my own brand!") and scratched his beer belly. He wore a woolen version of a wife beater, a baseball hat, tinted pink glasses, and therapeutic shoes. He wagged a finger at me, "I came fully prepared!" as he poured himself a cup of tea from his thermos. His wife was clad in a purple leotard, mini skirt, and crocs. All dangerous signs that she intended to be comfortable for a long day.

They played good gangster, bad gangster. Or rather, mob boss and crazier right hand.

They claimed Canadian citizenship. The police spat and cursed them as "running dogs."

Hour 2.


The policeman questioned us individually while sipping his oolong tea. He nodded and drew a lot of diagrams. Finally, he sighed, leaned in, and told us that while he was sympathetic to our side, he could do nothing. The law was weak. The police were weaker. This was China.

He said it without frustration or indignation. It was simply a fact. He had probably said it many times to many different faces sitting across his table.

He then gave us tips on dragging this out with the landlord. He wanted us to stick it to them.

Hour 3.


The police told the landlord to settle with us peacefully. The landlady sat back, folded her arms, and told me that this was China. She would have their people stalk us 24 hours a day. Disrupt every meeting. Smoke in every room. Drag us to the police station every day. Until we pay.

The landlord then winked at me and whispered that he would probably be delegated the stalking duty. He asked me about our working hours and the company cafeteria food.

Hour 4.


In between negotiating terms, the landlady and the housing agent broke into another fight. After I calmed them down with a joke, the landlady suddenly turned to me.

"Do you know why I called you so often?"

"Because you didn't like calling the agent?"

"Well yes. But everytime I got so mad and wanted to yell at somebody, I called you, and then I felt so much better. Your voice is so gentle. You should switch jobs. How about going into counseling?"

She turned to the agent.

"You need to change your temper. This is why you're still not married. In fact, you should call Sisi more often. It's a great way to release stress."

While I was processing this dreaded compliment, I overheard the landlord telling my friend in the background that all this - the police  involvement, threats, extortion - was just business as usual and that he really liked him personally. He also offered to consult our company ("for small fee only!") on collecting defaulted micro-credit loans from factory workers. After all, he specialized in debt collection back on the streets of Hong Kong.

Hour 5.


I wrote out the new agreement, squeezing out as many pretentious "such as, but not limited to" and "Party A hereby agrees . . .," as a previous lawyer-wannabe would under duress.


We finally left the police station. I handed over the money. The landlady wanted my friend out by that night, otherwise he would incur another fine. So I called up all the boys I knew in the area and we packed and heaved and carried and shoved while the landlord worked on his third cigar.

Hour 6.


More of my friends piled into the house to help. The landlady kept thinking we were going to beat them up. So she had her cronies on alert, ready to come in and balance the numbers. She had security guards physically block the door and even turned off our electricity.

Hour 7.


The police was called in again. He came in, yelled a little bit, then paused to ask me if I had cried. He also asked the landlord whether he could take a tour around the big house. He even took off his hat reverently.

The landlord told me that I was silly for caring so much. He told my boss that I was a good worker and that I deserved a year-end bonus. He also offered to come and collect on my behalf if that bonus never materialized.

Hour 8. 


Last packing van pulled out. The landlady said she wanted to take me out to dinner. For once, I didn't feel guilty saying no.

Three Ayis

One. 


I met her on my first day at work while she was cleaning the bathroom. She was flushing the toilets with a violence normally reserved for confronting minute maids. I asked her if she was ok. She looked at me, then glanced left and right, all the while pursing her lips. With a conspirator's whisper, she told me that we should retreat to the stairways, where it would be safe to talk because there were no security cameras.

There I listened, fidgeting with my work badge, while she railed against management and her hourly rates. I asked her where the recycling bin was. She refused to tell me, instead offering to give me a 40% cut from her scrap paper + bottles sales if I would be her supplier.

Since then, I've often had to excuse myself and walk through five or six ayis unionizing in the stairway. She was always the one sitting on the highest stair, a queen bee who reigned their 15 minute breaks.

Two.


It's Wednesday, but the lady who usually tidied my papers and wiped down my office desk wasn't there. When she got back the next week, she seemed less excited about piecing the mustard yellow vacuum cleaner together. When she came around to my desk with the wet, purple rag, I told her I was sorry about her sister. She looked away, then shook her head slightly, pretended to be concerned about the ink spill on my desk. After soaking and wringing her rag a few times too many, she finally asked me what she should do with her 14 year old niece. She didn't have the resources to take her in and provide for her own son.

Three.


I stopped her in the hall and asked her about the ayi she replaced. Her eyes narrowed, calculating whether I was the one who told on the ayi and her unions. After deciding that a whistleblower wouldn't ask her to say hi to the other, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

She liked to keep me in on the loop regarding bathroom gossip. I now know which girl on the floor often didn't flush and which company, on the whole, was the dirtiest.

One day, as I was walking out of the bathroom, she called me over to the dark closet room with a loud whisper. She handed me her phone and asked me to help her get past her current level on her game. The rules were simple. Happy snails pushing crates onto apples get points in a garden maze. I fumbled pathetically. We didn't play games growing up.

I felt genuinely bad when she had to start all over because of my three failed attempts. She was on level 10. As I walked away, back to the office, I heard her mutter while picking up her mop, "Ayah. Made me start all over again. And I thought she was smart."

Commie Girl

Freshman year. First semester. PL SC 170 - Intro to International Politics.

It was our Communism unit. Somebody asked what it was. Somebody else talked about Russia. Cold War. And, inevitably, China. The general feeling was that the big bad "C" word was the short answer to China's problems.The professor smiled and let the discourse flow its increasingly hostile course.

I wore a forest green top, with a thin ribbon that tied at the back. I felt feminine. Felt like a college student. Felt the appropriately awkward freshman mix of confidence and insecurity. So I raised my hand, in hesitant increments, and got called upon.

"I am probably a little biased because my grandparents and relatives were involved with the People's Liberation Army, but as bad as Communism was, I believe that it was the best thing for China at the time." I rattled off how this ideology, although ultimately misguided and manipulated for factional power struggles, united a country that had been torn apart by wars for a whole century. I listed off a series of other justifications.

The room went quiet. The professor moved on. At the end of the class, as I picked up my lavender purple binder, I heard a psst and a whisper, "Look. There's that Commie girl."

And that was how I started getting random high fives by closet Communist sympathizers in the school food court.

---------

My friend Jonathan, a fellow BYU student interning at our company, doesn't quite call me Commie girl. Instead, he vigilantly catches all my absentminded references to "we" - meaning Chinese people - and schools me on being an appropriate American. If he had my US passport in hand, he would be waving it as a flag to warn me against being too cozy with my Chinese identity and too comfortable with the way of life in Communist China.

The truth is, I have loyalties everywhere, and therefore, by default, loyalties nowhere. I am, what us Hong Kongers affectionately dub, a "third culture kid" - having been born Chinese, raised American, but educated British.

In an American classroom, with classmates determined to re-win the Cold War with their textbook rhetoric on Communism, I merely tossed out another view. I was not volunteering to be a standard bearer/ martyr representing "the other side" in an ideological debate.

Communism is so much more than Marx, censorships, or good vs. evil. It has a human side, the encouraging and the horrifying.

Communism is three generations of China, juxtaposed, with the old comrades oddly accepting of the modern bourgeois which they fought against, the middle aged vocally angry about rights and corruption, and the young apathetic and distracted by marriage and financial pressures. It is honest people who bled and suffered for a cause, dispensing forgiveness with casual shrugs to the violent students who smashed up social order in their Red fervor. It is pig-faced officials who pulled strings to obtain a position where others pay them to pull strings. It is an increasingly capitalist China, allowing the dollar sign to replace the hammer and the sickle, where the farmers are shut out of the cities and its benefits because they lack the proper urban residence passports.

As for me, Communism is the backdrop of my grandparents' epic life stories ("Female comrades used cotton pieces from military coats as sanitary pads. Many men's coats were picked clean by the time they reached North Korea!"). It is the dream for which they sacrificed for, because they believed in the good of their country and their people.

So it's more out of a respect for my grandparents and their sacrifice, and a need for people to understand the rationale of the flip side, that I raised my hand that day and every day since then.

Psst. Commie girl coming through.